The Web hosting provider Aplus.Net (www.aplus.net) announced on May 11 the availability of six new marketing tools that help small businesses improve their search engine positioning efforts. A tool called Google KeySuggest evaluates website content and suggests a list of search-friendly words to include in page content. Aplus.Net created a tool called Backlink Tracker, which creates a list of the sites that contain links back to the target website. Three of the other tools, including the Google KeyRank Monitor, are dedicated to specific functions of the search engine giant Google, and the last tool, MSN KeyRank Monitor, does the same for the popular MSN search engine. Aplus.Net has licensed the technology for the new tools from PromotionWorld.com (www.promotionworld.com).
The search engine giant Google (www.google.com) announced on May 9 that its engineers are investigating the cause of the problem that shut down the company's search engine for a brief period over the weekend. All of Google's websites were temporarily inaccessible during the outage. Some users trying to access the page were redirected to a search engine called SoGoSearch, suggesting that the problem may have been at the Domain Name System (DNS) server level.
1Job.co.uk (www.1Job.co.uk) announced on May 5 that after 15 months of intense testing its UK and Ireland true jobs search engine is officially out of beta trials and is already driving hundreds of thousands of job hunters to vacancies advertised on the Web. The job specific vertical search engine now consistently collects, indexes and displays more than 100,000 fresh job adverts from employers, recruitment agencies and job boards each day. Free trials were provided to hundreds of recruiters in order to test, de-bug and develop the systems.
The search engine giant Google (www.google.com) announced on May 4 that it has dropped the price for its recently acquired Urchin on Demand Web analytics software (www.urchin.com) from $495 to $195 per month. The new price includes report profiles for up to 50 individual websites, up from Urchin's offer of one, and includes up to 100,000 page views per month. An additional one million page views are available for an extra $99 per month. A 15-day free trial of Urchin on Demand is available at www.urchin.com.
The search engine company Ask Jeeves Inc. (www.ask.com) announced on April 27 that its first-quarter profit rose 36 percent as the company attracted more users and advertising sales rose. Net income rose to $18.1 million, or 26 cents a share, from $13.4 million, or 23 cents, a year earlier. Revenue more than doubled to $94.9 million. About 74 percent of Ask Jeeves’ sales in the quarter came from an agreement to display ads supplied by the search engine giant Google Inc. (www.google.com).
The search engine giant Yahoo Inc. (www.yahoo.com) announced on April 28 that it has released a beta version of its new personal search engine My Web (http://myweb.search.yahoo.com), which will enable registered users to set up a searchable archive of everything they look for online. As well as being able to save favorite Web pages, users will also be able to keep a record of their search results and retrieve the results when and if required.
The search engine giant Google Inc. (www.google.com) announced on April 25 that it has added a new feature on a trial basis, My Search History (www.google.com/searchhistory), which allows users to save and view the Web searches they conduct at the search engine’s website. Users can either use their Gmail e-mail address or login details of their registration at the Google Groups site (http://groups-beta.google.com) to use this service. New users can sign up for this service at www.google.com/searchhistory.
The search engine giant Google Inc. (www.google.com) announced on April 20 that it has sued Froogles.com (www.froogles.com), charging the rival shopping search engine with trademark infringement. Google filed a 68-page complaint against Froogles.com in the Eastern District Court of New York. The complaint alleges that Froogles.com’s proprietor Richard Wolfe illegally traded on Google's famous name and search brand for profit with a nearly identical mark. Google asked the court to shut down its rival and order transfer of the domain name, among other relief.
The search engine giant Google Inc. (www.google.com) announced on April 19 that it has introduced its local information and mapping services to the UK, opening up new channels to advertisers in the process. Google Local UK (http://local.google.co.uk) now offers regional information including business listings and related Web pages. It combines local business data from Yell.com (www.yell.com), with local information from Google's index of more than 8 billion Web documents. The service also allows Google AdWords advertisers to reach customers searching for businesses, products and services in their area using locally targeted advertisements.
WebStream Internet Solutions (www.webstream.net), a Web hosting and Internet services provider, announced on April 15 that it is offering a new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program that tweaks websites for increased findability on major search engines. The program allows clients to choose their level of investment, depending on the size of the site and the number of keywords they want. The service pertains to the top 10 major search engines, covers a minimum of one year of service and provides monthly reporting and statistics for clients to track results.
